Microdata Condition and Price notifications

Hello, I'm really looking for some reassurance I think! Or someone to tell me we have completely got it all wrong.

It's a bit of a long story, I just want to make sure you have all the facts I can provide.

Up until a week ago we were only uploading 66 of our products, just the base versions with no variations. Everything has worked perfectly like that for well over a year now. We were obtaining over 3000 impressions a day and sales were great.

As a next step we decided to include all our variations for the products. Uploaded a total of 775 product without a problem. It took about 1.5 days for them to be approved. Perfect we thought! Then all of a sudden they started getting disapproved, so a few email conversation later with google telling us to be patient it will correct it's. It did around 3 days later, all now approved again. Excellent I thought.....

We then started to get Condition and price micro data notifications, this went up to 550, then fell back to 420 before rising again... it's now at over 500 again. We have made no changes. Last night they got upgraded to a warning.

Re: Microdata Condition and Price notifications

only one, single, physical, inventory item maybe submitted as an item-offer for a shopping-ad.

only a physical item that is currently in the merchant's physical possession may be submitted as an in stock offer.

only one, single, offer is ever allowed on a landing-page --if there are multiple variants on a landing-page, googlerecommends the link preselects one, single, variant.

the price submitted for an offer must match the landing-page

(microdata) item-offer price and the displayed price, exactly,

at all times -- for u.k. submitted data, price must include vat.

each physical item-offer (variant) mustbe submitted separately and must havean identical item_group_id for all items within a variant group.

at least one variant attribute -- size, color, material, pattern -- valuemust differ among all items within any variant group that is submitted;

e.g. 600 mm, 3000k warm white, led

not all variants are required to be submitted --however, any variant that is submitted must be in themerchant's physical possession and adhere to all variantpolicies, in the submitted data, and on the landing-page.

otherwise, google may disapprove (all) items or suspend the website or merchant, at any time.

multi-offer pages are only allowed on marketplaces, such as ebay, where multiple merchants are submitting identical offers or categories -- such landing-pages cannot be submitted as a shopping-ad, at all.

Re: Microdata Condition and Price notifications

It's always a bummer when something that's working well stops working, even if only for a little while.

Google Shopping campaigns tend to be sensitive to changes to the data feed, which makes sense since the campaign targeting is directly based upon the feed data.

1. Did you make any changes to the base products in your feed? Theoretically your impression share for those products shouldn't diminish if you haven't changed those products. I recommend identifying the specific products which were generating most of your clicks, and see if they have changed and if your top search terms are currently triggering them.

2. Celebird provided you with some helpful context about how to submit product variants. There's not much for me to add to that.

Google Shopping does tend to take a while to sort things out, so the reps you're speaking with are probably right. You probably need to wait a bit, monitoring things closely, so that the system can figure out your new data.

At the same time, I do recommend closely analyzing your base products to identify any problems or changes that might be affecting your volume.

If there are multiple offers on the whole page, each offer present on the page is annotated with a SKU or a GTIN and the respective offer in your product data on Shopping has the same SKU ('id' attribute) or GTIN ('gtin' attribute). This can be useful if you show multiple variants of the same product (e.g. different sizes or colors) on the same landing page.

Which is what we have done.

Anyhow, I will let everyone know what we are experiencing. As I'm sure we are not the only ones out there!

be certain item_group_id are being submitted with proper values --otherwise, variants and variant attributes cannot be submitted.

if only in-stock, physical, items are being submitted as individual offersand each variant is identified by global-trade-data or id microdata, onthe link landing-page, then the snippet warnings may usually be ignored.

regardless of any microdata, if all google's crawlers cannot clearly matchthe physical item's submitted price, with a specific displayed price andcorresponding displayed item, on the link landing-page, that is groundsfor disapproval or suspension, at any time.

also, check the products-tab to be certain all items within avariant-group are being assigned identical item_group_id --verify all items are matching a product-group and are beingassigned a bid within the linked account's shopping-campaign.

related, be certain a unique id is assigned to each product (variant)and the id never changes for the physical item; a best-practice is touse a mix of letters and numbers for id; e.g. abc123uk

parent-sku or related abstractions are never allowed to be submitted as an item.